Modern managed information environments are injecting ever increasing levels of security capabilities. At one time, cryptographic operations for safeguarding data were time and computationally expensive such that they were typically reserved for highly sensitive government and financial contexts. As processor speed rises and memory capacities increase, the ability to perform cryptographic operations once only reserved to specialized, expensive hardware is now commonplace in many applications. Conventional off the shelf (OTS) applications embed cryptographic capabilities into software because it no longer creates a processing bottleneck to do so.
Further, as network capacities continue to rise, with increasing use of broadband (e.g. cable modem) Internet access and increasing popularity of WiFi capability (e.g. 802.11b/g wireless), the sheer quantity of data transmitted heightens the awareness that unencrypted transmissions (so called “plaintext”) run an increasing risk of divulging sensitive information. There is an emerging tendency to encrypt most or all data during transmission because there are minimal perceived drawbacks to doing so. Accordingly, data in transit between a source and a destination is often encrypted.